


it flickers

by mambo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Disaster Gay Vampire Bucky Barnes, Happy Ending, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Modern Era, Suicidal Thoughts, Vampire Bites, Vampire Bucky Barnes, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 22:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19071565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mambo/pseuds/mambo
Summary: Bucky Barnes is a vampire mistaken for a guardian angel.





	it flickers

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this fic for literal years. It started off as a Tumblr prompt that I wanted to expand, but I could never get it the way that I wanted. After agonizing over it for a long time, I decided to just finish it and get it out into the world. Hope you enjoy it!!

You reach a point where you’re just sick of the hunt.

Well, that’s not necessarily true for all vampires. Just the decent ones. The assholes don’t get sick of the hunt but they’re… well, they’re assholes. Bucky may be a vampire, but he doesn’t like to think of himself as one of the assholes. Partially because he’s sick of the hunt, but for other reasons, too. He tries his best to be the best he can be.

Still, Bucky has to eat, which is why he’s wandering around the Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn. He has a connection there that’ll sneak him out a bag of blood every so often. He doesn’t do it too much — he knows that the blood can be life or death for the humans that need it — but it’s been a long week, there’s gentle, steady snow falling around him, and he’s looking for an easy fix since it’s the kind of night where people are hunkered up in their apartments, waiting it out until the snow lets up.

He’s waiting beneath the streetlight that he always waits beneath when he notices the kid sitting on a bench across the street alone.

The streetlight above him is flickering, and between the snow and the shadow, the scene is like something out of a Hopper painting, the kind of lonely Brooklyn scene that Bucky has seen again and again since he came to Brooklyn for the first time in 1894.

Bucky doesn’t know what, exactly, compels to walk across the street. Maybe it’s the way that a small pile of snow has begun to collect on the top of the boy’s yellow hair and in the creases of his jacket. Or the way that his glasses slip halfway down his nose as he stares down at the ground.

Maybe it’s the way that the light of the flickering streetlamp reflects on the wet streaks left on his cheeks left by his tears.

No matter what the reason, he’s soon standing close to the kid. “Hey kiddo,” Bucky says, wincing internally. He’s been alive for a long time, but he’s still kind of a joke when it comes to interacting with people. “You lost or something?”

The kid looks up. The tip of his nose is red. “No,” he says, sounding a little indignant.

“Are you… okay?” Bucky asks. He’s not quite sure how to talk to kids; it’s been a long time since he’s tried. He’s not one of those assholes who’ll grab a kid out of the playground for a quick meal. It’s adults or bust for Bucky.

“I’m waiting for my ma,” the kid says, like that’s a real explanation.

“Do you need an adult?” Bucky asks. He doesn’t include himself in that equation, despite having hit his centennial a few years ago.

The kid manages to level him with a judgmental glare through his tears, which is honestly pretty impressive. There have been few times in Bucky’s hundred-plus years of life and unlife that Buck has ever felt this low. “How old do you think I am?” the kid asks in a surprisingly low voice.

Bucky pauses. “Ten?” he asks, already dreading the kid’s answer.

The kid rolls his eyes. “I’m seventeen.”

“Oh, well…” Bucky says. He fidgets. “I just thought—“

“My mom’s in there getting chemo,” the kid interrupts.

There’s a moment where Bucky just looks at the kid, who is looking up at him with something between expectancy and trepidation. Bucky exhales. “Shit,” he says, then flops down onto the bench next to the kid. “That’s heavy.”

The kid nods. “Yeah,” he says, “shit.”

They sit quietly for a moment. Bucky looks out at the streetlight that he usually stands underneath, watches the snow as it flutters around its cone of light. He’s never looked at the streetlight from this perspective before.

“You got feelings you need to get out or something? I don’t got anywhere to be.”

The kid looks up, raises an eyebrow. “You’re not some kinda pervert murderer, are you?” he asks.

“Murderer yes, pervert no,” Bucky says. The kid rolls his eyes again. “I won’t murder you, though, if that’s any kind of consolation.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” the kid says. He smiles at Bucky for the first time. “I’m Steve.”

“Bucky,” Bucky says.

And that’s how it starts.

— —

“Hey Bucky,” Steve says the next week. He hadn’t meant to come back, but he was wandering again, and found himself back at Mount Sinai, back to talk to Steve.

“Hey Steve,” Bucky says, taking the seat next to him. “How’s your ma?”

“Pale,” Steve says.

“So’re you,” Bucky says.

“That’s ironic, coming from you. You ever see the sun?” Steve asks.

“You’re salty,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes. “And for a matter of fact, I have seen the sun. The year was 1893 and I was in Chic—HEY,” Bucky says as Steve elbows him in the side.

“Stop being an ass. I’m trying to be sullen.”

“You want me to go?” Bucky asks.

There’s a long pause, then Steve shakes his head. “The company is nice,” he says, his voice quiet.

And maybe that’s what keeps Bucky coming back week after week for the next three months — the fact that Steve doesn’t really have anyone else to talk to about this, and Bucky has all the time in the world to talk to Steve.

— —

“Brought you something,” Bucky says, handing Steve a thermos.

“What’s this?” Steve asks.

“Hot cocoa,” Bucky says. “Made with almond milk.”

Steve reaches out and takes it. “Thanks,” he says. He doesn’t open it, though. He just stares at the thermos in his hands.

“You okay?” Bucky asks, soft as he sits down. It’s been three months since he met Steve for the first time, and he’s gotten pretty good at reading Steve’s moods. This quietness is unlike anything Bucky’s seen before, though, even on Sarah’s worst days.

“I have some good news for you,” Steve says, looking up at Bucky with a smile and tearstained cheeks.

“What’s that?” Bucky asks with trepidation.

“This is the last time we’re going to have to meet like this.”

Shit.

Fuck.

That means one of two things: Sarah is in remission, or she’s—

“The funeral is on Tuesday,” Steve says, looking back down at the thermos. “It happened really quick,” he adds, quietly. “She was there when she went to sleep. She just didn’t wake up again.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, quiet.

Steve wipes at his cheeks. “Anyhow, I came here to tell you that you don’t need to come again.”

“Who’re you staying with?” Bucky asks.

“My landlord is letting me stay until school finishes up. After that… I guess I’m getting a job, figuring it out after that.”

“What about Pratt?” Bucky asks. The week that Steve got his acceptance letter was one of their best meetings. He brought it for Bucky to look at, and he had this look of utter pride and excitement on his face, talking about the future and being an artist and how this acceptance was the first step on the road to achieving his dreams.

Steve’s lip trembled. “I can’t afford it. Even with the financial aid, I can’t.”

“Have you talked to them about it?” he asks. Steve nods. “Anything I can do for you?” Bucky asks.

Steve rummages through his pocket and pulls out a slip of paper. He hands it to Bucky. Bucky looks down to see Steve’s name and a phone number written down in ballpoint pen. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I don’t want to lose touch,” he says. “You’ve really… it’s been nice, having you here. Even if you are a murderer.”

Bucky nods, takes the paper from Steve, and slips it in his pocket. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll keep this safe.”

“You don’t need to keep it safe, just use it,” Steve says with a little smile.

“I will,” Bucky says.

He doesn’t know if it’s a promise or a lie.

“I’m going to go now,” Steve says. “It’s late, and I have things that I need to get ready for.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, watching Steve stand up. “See you around,” Bucky says.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Around.”

Bucky watches Steve walk away from the bench and towards the intersection. He watches Steve wait at the intersection, fiddling with a pair of tangled headphones while trying to juggle the thermos of hot chocolate. He watches as a car careens towards Steve, hits him, then keeps driving.

Bucky screams.

He runs to where Steve lays on the sidewalk, blood pooling beneath his head, one leg askew in a way that it shouldn’t be. He’s breathing, short, huffy, wheezy breaths as blood trickles from the side of his mouth. “Steve,” Bucky says. Steve doesn’t respond. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ,” Bucky says, looking around. There’s no one else there, no one to witness or testify or—

See. No one there to see.

“Fuck,” Bucky repeats again, quieter.

He’s never done this before. It kills people as often as it saves them, and sometimes it does worse. It turns people into a creature like Bucky, which Bucky doesn’t want for Steve. But Steve is _dying_ , and there’s no way that going into the hospital could save him, so the only thing there is for Bucky to do is to bite his own wrist, open a vein, and stick it in Steve’s mouth, hoping that a few drops — and just a few drops — will fall down Steve’s throat.

He removes his hand, then waits, one second, then another.

Steve’s eyes open.

Bucky releases a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. “Steve,” he says.

“Bucky?” Steve asks. “What just…” he trails off. “I’m on the ground.”

“I’m going to help you sit up,” Bucky says, doing just that. They go slow — while Steve’s cheeks have got their color back and his wounds are already healing, things won’t be totally right for another minute or so — but Steve is able to sit up on his own. “There you go,” he says.

“That car hit me,” Steve says.

Bucky nods. “Yeah,” he says.

“I should be dead,” Steve says.

Bucky pauses. “You’re alive,” he says with a small smile.

“You saved me?” Steve asks. “How?”

Bucky should’ve never spoken to Steve in the first place. He should’ve had his dinner and walked along. There’s no reason he should’ve gotten attached to a human. It was stupid, a mistake, and one that he’s not going to repeat.

“Look at me,” Bucky says, soft. Steve does so, because he’s a good kid. “You didn’t come here tonight,” he says, and feels the soft heat in his head that happens every time that he uses his power. “You thought about it, but didn’t. You didn’t want to face me, and that’s okay. You don’t feel guilt about that; you wanted to spare me the knowledge of knowing that your mother passed away.” He swallows. “You’re gonna go home when I’m done talking, okay? You’re gonna go home and take a shower and go right to bed. There’s gonna be a great surprise for you in the morning, too, but you don’t know that yet. You’ll just have that feeling when you go to bed tonight.” A tear drips from Bucky’s eye. Steve looks at him, vacant. “I’m so sorry about your ma, kid. I’m so, so sorry. But you’re gonna have a great life. I promise.” He exhales, slowly. “You’re not gonna see me again. I know that if you see me again, it’s less likely that this will be effective. So this is it, kid. Anything you wanna say?”

“Thank you,” Steve says, in a sort of sing-song voice. “Thanks for everything, for sitting with me. I don’t have many people. Don’t have anyone, now that my ma died. But you made it a lot more bearable.”

“I haven’t been anybody’s somebody in a long time,” Bucky admits. “Thanks for telling me that.”

“You’re welcome,” Steve says.

“Anything else?” Bucky asks. Steve shakes his head. “Okay, shut your eyes and count to five. When you open them again, I’ll be gone, and you’ll go home. Okay?” Steve nods, shuts his eyes, and starts counting.

Bucky turns into a bat and flies away.

— —

It’s not hard to get into the Pratt financial aid office. He sets up a fund to pay for all of Steve’s tuition, room, and board, plus an extra chunk of cash a month to make sure he doesn’t have to take a job he doesn’t want and has some cash for the movies. Bucky’s accrued enough money over the past century and a half that it barely makes a dent in his bank account, and it’s nice to spend money on something that will actually make a difference to someone.

He just wishes that he could be the one to make the call to Steve.

Still, he knows that it’ll be best if he disappears, if Steve doesn’t see him again. For a lot of reasons. Besides, he’s been in New York for eight years now, and people are starting to get suspicious. Natasha’s been on the West Coast for a year or so, and has been badgering him to join her. He’s just going to do it with a little less advance notice than he usually does.

He still has Steve’s phone number in his pocket when he leaves. He doesn’t know why he keeps it; he just does.

— —

_Ten Years Later_

— —

Bucky does not want to go to the art gallery. Frankly, Bucky does not want to go to _any_ art gallery, ever. Art is not Bucky’s thing. Art has _never_ been Bucky’s thing. He remembers walking into An American Place in New York City and telling Alfred Stieglitz himself that he didn’t understand why Arthur Dove did what he did to canvases. That didn’t go down well, but he still bought the Arthur Dove canvases, because Natasha told him to. Natasha tells him all of the artists he should invest in and she’s always been right. Playing the art market has padded his bank account since 1903 and remains his best source of income. Just one of his Lichtensteins can keep him afloat for a decade and Bucky has sixteen of them.

“Who am I looking for?” Bucky asks her.

“There’s a few in here I’m interested in,” she says. “But I need to look at the individual canvases to decide which ones we should get.”

Bucky nods, shoves his hands in his pockets and follows along. He doesn’t try to understand the reasons behind what Natasha does. He just follows. So far, it’s worked out well.

“Not so sure I’m into this stuff,” Bucky says as they pass by a canvas caked with thick kelly green paint. There’s texture, sure, but there’s something so incredibly drab about the piece that it’s almost sad.

Natasha grabs his arm and pulls him away from the canvas. “We’re not here for those,” she says as she steers him toward the other side of the gallery.

“Can I poke them?” Bucky asks, quietly, because he knows the answer.

Natasha gives him an icy glare that he knows means no before she stops in front of a series of canvases. “These are what we’re here for,” she says.

Bucky looks up at a wall of canvases and nods. “These’re good,” he says.

“Glad you noticed.”

“Only took me a hundred years, but I think I’ve developed some taste,” he says, leaning in to get a good look at one of the pieces.

They’re abstract city scenes. It’s not something that hasn’t been done before — Bucky spent the better part of the 1930s collecting pieces with a similar vibe to them — but there’s something uniquely modern about the pieces that he can’t quite place. There’s a sharp energy in the work, with jagged lines and motion. Something almost technological, but not without warmth.

Bucky loves them. Even without much knowledge about art, he knows that these pieces evoke a reaction in him. Very few pieces he looks at or owns do that.

He looks at each one with a keen eye, more excited after each canvas.

And then he stops at the second-to-last one on the wall.

It’s a familiar scene, painted from the viewpoint of underneath a particular flickering street lamp across the street from Mount Sinai hospital. There’s snow blocking the perspective, dots of nearly transparent paint that are both haphazard and distinct, blocking the view of the figures in the near-distance, sitting together on a park bench. There’s something about it that reads more real than the other paintings, which are more overt in their abstraction. Or maybe it just feels less abstract to Bucky because it’s a scene out of his own memory.

“This one is special,” he says, turning to Natasha. “I need this one.”

“That one isn’t for sale,” says a deep voice behind him. Bucky glances behind him to see one of the gallery’s employees fiddling with some work on a wall behind them. He’s tall and blond and doesn’t even bother looking Bucky’s way.

Art people. Obnoxious.

He conveniently forgets that he makes his living as one of them.

Bucky sighs, trying to keep himself from getting too disappointed over it. It’s not often that he actually wants one of the paintings he sees. Still, he turns back to the painting; he doesn’t want to stop looking at it. He thinks about the kid a lot, wonders what happened to him. The kid was just charming; sweet, despite all of the crap he was going through. Bucky had enjoyed talking to him. And there was part of him that enjoyed, even for a short while, being someone else’s person. That hadn’t happened to him before; it hasn’t happened to him since. Bucky loves his friends and he likes his life, but he also knows that there’s no one on the planet that needs him. It would be nice to have that again.

“Why this one?” Natasha asks, an eyebrow raised.

Bucky gives a little shrug. “It reminds me of something… of someone.” He shakes his head. “That’s the problem with getting old. Everything starts feeling like it’s plucked from some part of the past, but that ain’t it. It’s just that your past starts getting so wide that just about anything feels like it can fit.”

“That was surprisingly deep,” Natasha says with a smirk.

“Well, even a kiddie pool can flood,” Bucky says, shrugging. He turns around to the salesman. “Their other work, is it for sale?”

“Yeah,” the guy says. “Gimme a second, I’m just…” He finishes messing with a frame, then turns around.

Bucky’s throat goes dry.

The guy’s eyes go wide.

“I think you were wrong,” the guy says. “I think you can call that one of your memories.” He sounds almost breathless.

Bucky exhales, nods, then books it out of the gallery as fast as his feet will take him.

He hears Steve shout, “Wait!” and Natasha laugh, but he ignores both, not stopping until he’s fifteen blocks away and can remember that he can fly.

— —

Bucky is halfway through packing his apartment when there’s a knock at his door. He glances at the clock — it’s eleven, which means it’s too late for an Amazon delivery, but too early for the milkman. Not that Bucky actually gets milk delivered, but it’s a metaphor. He knows it’s not Natasha because she’d just come in. And he doesn’t really have any other friends.

If he still had a heart, it’d be beating fast.

Technically he does have a heart. It’s just not _working_. His brain’s all too scrambled up for metaphors at the moment.

He almost doesn’t answer the door, but then whoever it is knocks again, that old ‘shave and a haircut’ tune that makes him want to chuckle, albeit in a stressed and breathless kind of way.

If Bucky has any courage left in his old, tired body, he screws it to the sticking place and heads to the door.

“Hi,” Steve says with a hopeful smile, holding a canvas-shaped package wrapped in butcher paper. “Please don’t shut the door.”

“I wouldn’t shut…” Except he would. He pauses, swallows, and pastes on a smile. “Hi Steve,” he says. “What brings you to my humble abode?”

“I have something for you,” Steve says, looking down at the package. “It’s the painting you liked.”

“Steve,” Bucky says.

“Don’t,” Steve interrupts. “I made it for you, for when we saw each other again. It was always going to be for you.”

Bucky’s throat feels dry. “It’s really good, though. You should sell it or something.”

“I sell enough paintings,” Steve says. He won’t break eye contact. It’s unnerving. Bucky only ever looks humans in the eye when he’s about to eat them; it helps remind him of their humanity and makes it easier to pull away while they’re still okay. “I hung that painting in the gallery hoping that you’d see it. I didn’t know any other way to…” He pauses, sighs, then gives a little self-conscious smile. “You’re really hard to track down.”

“Purposefully,” Bucky says.

“Natasha gave me your address after you left, in case you were wondering.”

Bucky frowns. “Oh, she did now, did she?”

Steve straightens up, brow furrowing. “Is that an issue?” he asks, voice so damn deep that Bucky’s taken aback for a second. Steve always had a deep voice, but it’s gotten deeper. Maybe it lost some of that deepness in the recesses of his memory. Bucky wants to memorize the sound, make it so he doesn’t forget again.

“No,” Bucky says, surprising himself with the vehemence in his voice. “No, it’s not,” he adds, a little quieter.

They’re silent for a moment, and Bucky just lets himself look at Steve. God, he’s tall now. He’s taller than Bucky is. The hearing aid is gone, as are the glasses. His red flannel is probably hiding about fifty pounds of muscle, and his jeans are speckled with paint. He’s this amalgamation of both familiar and unfamiliar in a way that floors Bucky. For Bucky, ten years is almost like a blink of an eye. Now, seeing Steve, he realizes just how long that is for most humans. Steve’s mom was forty-two when she died; if Steve has a similar life expectancy, he’s more than halfway through…

Bucky swallows hard. He doesn’t want to think about that.

But still, some of the changes are Bucky’s own fault. Like the hearing aid… was that from Bucky? When he saved Steve? What changes were supposed to happen, and what weren’t? It makes Bucky want to curl into a little ball right there in the doorway to think of that autonomy that he stole from Steve, how he may’ve changed the course of his life.

Then again, if he hadn’t done it, Steve wouldn’t be halfway through his life. Steve would just be dead.

It’s a lot of conflicting emotions. More than he’s had to experience at once in about thirty-seven years or so. Bucky hates it, which just adds another emotion to the swirling miasma of his mind. He also hates himself for thinking that past sentence.

Bucky hates everyone and everything and needs to move out of New York _tonight_.

“Here,” Steve says, breaking the silence of the space and the turbulence of Bucky’s mind as he holds out the canvas. “If you don’t want it, you can give it away, or sell it, or throw it in the trash. But it’s yours. It was always yours. I’ve just been holding onto it up until now.”

Bucky reaches out for the canvas. “I’ll hang it up tomorrow,” he promises in a soft voice. God, there’s something about Steve that makes him feel so tender.

“Bucky,” Steve says, voice cracking. He looks down, seeming almost angry at himself. “I feel like there are a few conversations we need to have.”

“Really? ‘Cuz, I’m not so sure,” Bucky says, positioning the canvas so it’s a little less awkward to hold.

Steve straightens up, looking like he’s ready for an argument, then purses his lips. “I won’t fight you,” he says, but before Bucky can exhale with any sort of relief, he adds, “for now.”

Bucky turns away so he can smile and snort. “Jeez,” he says. “You haven’t changed much.”

He looks back to see Steve’s searching look. “Neither have you,” he says with a frown. His eyes look Bucky’s body up and down, then head straight to Bucky’s eyes, looking like a challenge.

Bucky wishes he hadn’t looked back.

“Thank you for the painting,” Bucky says, already inching back into his apartment. “I’ll—”

“Wait, Bucky, no,” Steve says, actually reaching out to keep the door open. His expression has gone frantic, eyes wide, mouth just slightly open. “I’ve looked for you for such a long time.”

“I’m—”

“Can I see you again?” he asks. “It doesn’t have to be tonight. And we don’t have to talk about anything important. I just…” He swallows hard. “I missed you.” Steve pauses, face falling. “You were there and then you were gone. I thought I’d made you up or something, but then…” He stops, pursing his lips. “I just want to see you again.”

“I’m not really a dependable guy,” Bucky says.

“That’s not true,” Steve says. “We both know that.”

Bucky doesn’t quite know how to respond to that.

“What do you want?” Bucky asks with a tight smile.

“Coffee? Tomorrow morning?”

“Uh, tomorrow morning is tough for me,” Bucky says. He pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Let me see if I have something later…” He literally just goes to the weather page to check what time the sun will set at. “I could do dinner? 6:45 at uh, Nino’s? You know that place?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, suddenly grinning. Bucky’s read all sorts of books where they talk about someone’s smile spreading across their features like a rising sun or some bullshit like that. Steve’s smile is nothing like that. It’s zero to nothing, a sudden blast of brilliant radiance whose sheer wattage makes Bucky want to stick his hand up in front of his face and hiss, a la Frank Langella as Dracula.

It had somehow escaped his notice, but Steve became very handsome in the past decade.

“Please be there,” Steve says, smile fading just as quickly as it came.

“I will,” Bucky promises.

“I…” Steve starts. He pauses, purses his lips, then starts again, “I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we have this chance.”

Bucky swallows hard. “Me too,” he says, though he’s not sure what good can come of this.

— —

Natasha arrives an hour later with two bags of B-Negative blood from a local hook up, a tin of caviar, and a bottle of cheap champagne. Bucky tries his best to keep from getting donation blood too often because he knows it’s not for him, but he can’t just go out and suck someone’s blood after the emotionally taxing evening he’s had. It’d just be too much.

Thankfully, Natasha knows that.

Unthankfully, everything that happened is all her fault.

“Did you know?” Bucky asks halfway through his second glass of champagne.

“I had an inkling,” she says.

“Remind me when I’m seven hundred years old not to get kicks out of putting my friends through emotionally traumatizing situations.”

Natasha snorts. “When you’re seven hundred years old you’ll realize just how hard it is to find entertainment. Somehow, the latest superhero movies don’t do it for me.” She leans in towards Bucky and raises her glass. “To emotionally traumatizing situations. They remind us that we’re only mostly dead.”

“Here here,” Bucky says, tipping his glass against hers with a satisfying clink. “To being dead, except for our hearts.”

“May they beat on with the sheer force of embarrassment.”

She laughs, they drink, and Bucky tries not to think about tomorrow. He just stares at the unwrapped painting leaning against his wall instead.

— —

Except that tomorrow inevitably comes.

Bucky’s alarm goes off at 5:45 PM and he groans. Natasha stayed practically until dawn and he’d had trouble falling asleep. By the time he’d actually gotten into bed, the sun had risen and he’d been drunk, his head spinning from the champagne and from his own stupidity.

He shouldn’t have agreed to meet Steve.

He was excited to see Steve.

He was terrified that Steve would see him as he really is.

So when his alarm goes off, he groans, but gets up. He’s only got an hour to get ready and he knows it, so he hops into the shower and tries to rub the tiredness from his eyes. He’s over a hundred years old but still has no tolerance for alcohol, probably because his diet is largely liquid based. It’s just a little unfair.

He showers. He shaves. He gets dressed. He does his hair.

And then it’s time to go.

It’s not until he’s standing in front of his door, wallet in his back pocket, keys in hand that he thinks about not showing up. It’s not like there’s much Steve could do about it. Sure, he knows where Bucky’s apartment is, but Bucky could move. He’s started over so many times before that it would be nothing. He could go back to Mexico City, or head back to Santa Fe for a while. Natasha’s spent the past few decades yearning for Prague, so he could probably convince her to do that, if he didn’t want to go alone.

But then he thinks about Steve sitting alone in the restaurant waiting for him, the way he’d sit ramrod straight until about an hour from now when he finally admits to himself that Bucky wasn’t coming. The way he’d slump down as he paid the server for his drink and the appetizer he’d bought as a way to fill time until Bucky arrived.

God, he doesn’t want to disappoint this kid.

So instead of fucking off to Prague or Bucharest or St. Petersburg, Bucky opens the door and heads out.

— —

“I ordered garlic bread,” Steve says, gesturing to the basket on the table in lieu of a real greeting. He’s grinning that mega-wattage smile again, looking clean in a plaid button-down shirt with his hair gelled back. The thought that Steve dressed up for him makes him feel at least four conflicting emotions, which he doesn’t want to untangle. Instead, he sits down next to Steve in the obvious date booth he’s seated in.

“Were you waiting long?” he asks, grabbing a white napkin off of the red and white-checked tablecloth and setting it on his lap.

Steve shakes his head. “I came early,” he says. He looks down at the piece of garlic bread he has on a plate in front of him and smiles. “I couldn’t sit still, so I just wanted to get here.” He looks back up at Bucky. “I’m really glad you came.”

Bucky just nods. “Yeah, well, it’s not like it was much of a hardship.”

“Have some garlic bread,” Steve says, passing the basket over to Bucky. “It’s really good.”

He maintains eye contact the entire time Bucky reaches into the basket, pulls out a piece of bread, and sets it on his plate. Steve seems to watch _very_ intently as Bucky rips off a piece of the garlic bread and puts it in his mouth.

It honestly makes Bucky a little nervous.

“It’s great,” Bucky says, once he’s chewed and swallowed.

Steve nods, seeming to deflate a little. He smiles at Bucky. “Have you been here before?” he asks.

“A few times,” Bucky says, neglecting to tell Steve that the last time he was here it had just opened and also it was 1924. “Hadn’t had the garlic bread, though. It’s good.” Though, Bucky will pay for it later. Garlic doesn’t poison vampires, but it does give them terrible indigestion.

Steve opens up a plastic-covered menu and says, “I was thinking about getting the gnocchi. Or do you want to split a pizza?”

“We could get a pizza,” Bucky says. “What toppings do you like?”

“I’m easy,” Steve says.

Bucky glances back at Steve from the side of his menu. “I thought you were lactose intolerant,” he says.

“I was,” Steve says. “Grew out of it. Grew out of a lot of things,” he adds. “Happened right around the time ma…” He trails off, shrugs. “How about pepperoni and spinach,” he says.

“Sounds good to me,” Bucky says as a woman in a white button down and a black apron approaches them.

“Hi there,” she says to Bucky. “I’m Pam and I’ll be your server. Can I get you something to drink?”

“House chianti?” Bucky asks.

She nods and jots something down on her order pad, then looks up at Steve. “You all good?” she asks.

He nods. “Yeah, I’m fine. But uh, I think we’ll have a large pizza with pepperoni and spinach.”

“Sounds good,” she says. “It’ll be a half an hour for that pizza.”

“Got it,” Steve says before she takes their menus and walks away.

There’s a moment of quiet, then Steve exhales. “I wanted to talk to you about the money,” he says.

“What money?” Bucky asks, ripping apart his garlic bread just so he has something to do with his hands as his stomach drops.

“The scholarship money,” Steve says. “So I could go to Pratt.”

“Not sure what you’re talkin’ about,” Bucky says. “But you went to Pratt, after all?” he asks, playing dumb.

Steve levels him with an unimpressed look. “You know I went to Pratt. You paid for it.”

It had only taken a few phone calls and promises to pay four years of Steve’s tuition and give him an anonymously endowed scholarship that would pay for his housing, food, and books, too. He’d told them that he was an estranged cousin who didn’t want to see Steve have to give up on his dreams just because his mother died. By the time he’d finished the conversation, he had the dean of financial aid in tears. The money wasn’t a problem for Bucky, and he knew it could really help Steve out. It seemed like the least he could do after everything else.

“I think you’re vastly overestimating both my financial resources and interest in you,” Bucky lies.

“I’m not,” Steve says. “I saw the paperwork.”

“You’re bluffing,” Bucky says.

Steve shakes his head. “I went out a few times with a guy working in the Financial Aid Office. Convinced him to let me see my file.”

“That’s tacky,” Bucky says just to hide how impressed he is.

“I didn’t _only_ go out with him to find out who my secret benefactor was,” Steve says. “He also had a decent ass.”

Bucky snorts out a laugh. “Wow,” he says. “And here I thought artists were supposed to be deep.”

Steve shrugs. “Would it sound better if I told you I was stricken by his aesthetic?”

Bucky shakes hies head. “You just come off as pretentious that way,” he says.

“But, to go back to my original point, I can pay—”

“Don’t,” Bucky interrupts. “I had the money. It was fine,” he says, conceding the point that he did pay for Steve’s education. There’s only so long he can hold up his end of an argument; he’s not one of those vampires who holds a grudge for eight hundred years.

“Why’d you do it?” Steve asks, only to be interrupted by their server returning with their pizza.

“Oh good,” Bucky says. “A distraction.”

“Here you boys are,” she says, setting the pizza down between them, then setting a white plate down in front of each of them. “Enjoy,” she says.

Steve just looks at Bucky over the steaming pie as she walks away. “I want to pay you back,” he says.

Bucky rolls his eyes as he reaches for the triangular pizza serving utensil, pulls himself off a slice, and drops it onto his plate. He does the same for Steve, who doesn’t seem to want to eat the pizza he ordered. Ironic, given that he’s the one who needs the pizza to survive.

“I’m serious,” he says when Bucky doesn’t respond.

Bucky sets down the utensil and looks at Steve. “Live a good life,” he says. He exhales. “When I was your age I had something really shitty happen to me. Took away most of my choices. I didn’t want that to happen to you. You were a good kid, and you seem like a good guy today. I had the money. You don’t need to worry — that was the whole point. And if you feel like you gotta chase me around because you feel like you owe me, you don’t. You’re not obligated. I’ll leave right now and not think anything less of you.”

“Don’t leave,” Steve says, too quick, hand shooting out like he’s about to grab onto Bucky and make him stay by force. He doesn’t touch Bucky though, it just hovers in the air between them. “I don’t want you to go.”

Bucky decides then and there that he’s moving tomorrow. Anchorage, Alaska should be nice this time of year. But, he’ll take tonight and eat some pizza.

— —

“When can I see you again?” Steve asks after the tiramisu.

“Listen, Steve, I’m not sure I should—”

“Stop,” Steve snaps. “Unless you actually don’t want to see me again, stop telling me that you don’t.”

Bucky stops short. Steve is looking _angry_ , of all things, brow furrowed and jaw set. He exhales slowly, shuts his eyes for a moment, then starts speaking again.

“I should go,” he says.

Bucky nods. “Probably.”

“I—” Steve starts. “I don’t deserve to be messed around with.” He says it like he’s convincing himself, and something wells up in Bucky’s throat. Of course Steve doesn’t deserve to be messed around with. “So if you really don’t want to see each other again, that’s… well, it’s not fine by me, but I would respect your choice. But I don’t think you don’t want to see me. I think there’s just something you’re trying to convince yourself of; I just don’t know what.”

Well, he’s not wrong.

“I’m gonna go,” Bucky says, scooting out of the booth.

Steve looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t. He hangs his head. “Alright,” he says.

“I want all of the best things for you,” Bucky says. “I hope you know that.”

“And what if I think you’re the best thing?” Steve asks with a sad smile.

“Well, you’d be wrong about that,” Bucky says before turning to go.

He pays the check on his way out.

— —

“No,” Natasha says over the phone.

“It’s just one more—”

“You need to go out and find yourself some food. I am not a blood bank,” she says before hanging up.

Bucky groans, hanging his head over the armrest of his couch so he’s hanging upside down. He could turn into a bat and do the same thing without making his back hurt, but this position feels as pathetic as his mood.

He’s managed to keep himself from leaving his apartment for a week, feeding off of a few blood bags Natasha snuck him and one unfortunate pizza delivery guy with an unfortunate smell. Every part of him aches for fresh, warm blood, but he doesn’t want to hunt. All he wants to do is stay in his apartment, stare at Steve’s painting, and pout.

The fact is, he’s thinking of Steve. He’s thinking of Steve, and it’s putting him in a funk.

Sighing, Bucky gets up from his couch. Getting a nice meal will make him feel better, and maybe going out on the hunt will remind him why he’s still kicking. He can really go for it tonight, maybe. Not just go for an easy target, but really _seduce_ like the sex demon he is.

He goes into his closet and gets his _tight_ pants out.

It’s time to hit the club.

— —

It’s not hard to catch the eye of the most attractive guy in the room.

He’s tall with copper-colored hair and green eyes that Bucky sees from across the room. Normally, Bucky wouldn’t go for someone quite so tall — he has to stretch to get to their neck, which always leaves him sore in the morning — but if the look the guy is giving him is any indication, Bucky may have the opportunity to feed from his femoral artery tonight, which he would not mind in the least.

Putting out some of those sexy vampire pheromones, Bucky makes his way across the room and towards the guy. “Hey,” he says, leaning in on the bar. The guy gives him an obvious once over. He must like what he sees, because he inches closer. “I’m Bucky.”

“Kevin,” the guy says. “You wanna dance?” he asks, tilting his head towards the dance floor. His floppy hair moves along with the movement, mussing it just a little.

Bucky feels suddenly very tired.

But if he wants to get Kevin into a femoral artery position, dancing is probably an absolute necessity. Gotta at least show interest before asking a guy back to your place, right?

“Sure,” he says, holding a hand out to Kevin. Grinning, Kevin takes his hand and then hurriedly rushes to the dance floor, practically dragging Bucky behind him.

Ugh. Millennials.

Kevin doesn’t waste any time, just gets right up onto Bucky as soon as they find some space. Bucky would be lying if he didn’t say that contact, the feel of Kevin’s pants as they brush against his own tight jeans, didn’t feel good. He grabs at Kevin’s waist and digs his fingers in deep. Kevin grins, pulling in close and leaning down for a—

And he’s suddenly very wet. “Whoops,” says a voice behind him.

Bucky turns to see an attractive man with a gap-toothed apologetic smile wearing a leather jacket. “Sorry about that,” he says. He’s holding an empty glass.

“Uh, it’s fine,” Bucky says, looking down at the already-thin material of his shirt, now practically translucent now that it’s wet. Since the spill came from the side, the whole left side of his body is wet. At least whatever he was drinking was clear; if it were a cosmo or something, Bucky probably would’ve had to go home and change.

“Nah man, it’s not okay. I’ve got a friend with a towel. We can get you dried off.” He glances at Kevin. “If your date doesn’t mind?”

“Uh, I don’t know this guy,” Kevin says with a shrug and honestly? Bucky feels almost hurt by it.

It also makes it easier to separate from Kevin and follow this guy to his friend and their towel. Not that the guy is really taking no for an answer — he loops an arm around Bucky’s and starts walking him off of the dance floor.

“What were you drinking?” Bucky asks, looking at his shirt.

“Water. I’m Sam, by the way,” the guy says.

“Bucky.”

“Oh, I know,” Sam says. Bucky looks over at him, brow furrowed and confused. But before he can make heads or tails of it, Sam says, “Here we are. Hey Steve, I made a friend.”

Oh fuck.

Steve turns around and says, “Oh fuck.”

Bucky would laugh if he weren’t considering turning into a bat and flying away.

Sam grins. “You still got that towel from earlier?” he asks.

“What…” Steve says, eyes trailing down to Bucky’s wet shirt. Not normally one for prudishness, Bucky has to resist the urge to cover himself. Steve looks to Sam with a frown. “I told you not to,” he says.

“I didn’t listen,” Sam says with a grin. He pats Bucky on the back and says, “I’ll let you two talk.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “I don’t like you much right now,” he says to Sam as he’s walking away.

“No, but you love me a _lot_ ,” Sam says as he heads towards the bar.

Steve looks back to Bucky. Bucky looks at Steve. God, he looks good in a tight white shirt and equally tight jeans. “I didn’t know you would be here,” Bucky says.

“Obviously,” Steve says, crossing his arms over his chest. Bucky doesn’t know if he’s purposefully flexing or something, but there’s a lot of muscle there. “Are you about to tell me that if you had known you would’ve gone somewhere else? Avoided this place entirely?”

Bucky shrugs. “Probably,” he says.

Steve rolls his eyes. “That’s ridiculous,” he says.

“Why do you say that?” Bucky asks.

“Because I think it’s awfully stupid to choose where you go based on whether or not someone you do or do not want to see is going to be there. You should stick to your own schedule.”

Bucky shakes his head, trying to follow this logic. “So you’re saying you shouldn’t go places to see people you like? Steve, do you have friends?”

“Of course I have friends,” Steve says, frown deepening. “I’m here with a friend.”

“But didn’t you just—”

“Are you here to pick someone up?” Steve interrupts.

Bucky shakes his head. “I don’t have a car.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “I meant _sexually_ ,” he says.

“Oh my God, Steve!” Bucky exclaims. “Why would you even ask me that?” This must be hell. He must’ve died in the past three days and now he’s in hell. That is the only possible explanation for what is happening here.

Steve exhales. “I don’t know that I want to stay here if you’re out there trying to pick up women.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “First of all, I would not be picking up women.” Steve’s eyes widen in surprise for just a moment, then settle back into his steely demeanor. “Second of all, I don’t see how that would have anything to do with your enjoyment of being here. Weren’t you just saying a second ago that you don’t base your… location on other people’s decisions?”

“Well…” Steve says, then pauses. He exhales, and moves his hands from across his chest to resting on his hips. He looks like he’s about to deliver a lecture. “Well, I’m sorry for making that assumption, especially since I’m not straight, either. But I’m also not sure that I can enjoy myself here knowing that you’re here scouting for dick.”

Bucky blinks. “What?” he asks.

“You heard me,” Steve says, rolling his eyes.

“I’m just wondering if I heard you correctly. Did you really just say, ‘scouting for dick’?”

“Yes.”

“Out loud. With your mouth. You just said that.”

“I don’t know why you’re so upset about that,” Steve says, pursing his lips.

Bucky shakes his head. “I think you just sucked all of the sexy out of the room with that one statement, is all.”

“So you won’t be scouting for…” He trails off, cheeks getting red.

“No, I will be,” Bucky lies. “It’s just gonna be a lot harder now that I’ll be thinking of you saying that while I’m trying to get some. Like, I’ll have some dude’s dick in my mouth and I’ll just be thinking of those words coming out of my mouth and my gag reflex will be _shot_.”

Steve is very red now. He goes back to crossing his arms over his chest and he’s fidgeting a little. “You don’t have to do that,” he says.

“Give a blowjob?” Bucky asks.

“I mean, you could… with me… if you weren’t…” He trails off, not looking at Bucky and seeming frustrated with himself.

Bucky takes a step closer and puts a reassuring hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Hey,” he says in a quiet voice. Steve looks up at him. “Take your time. Say what you need to say.”

Steve’s eyes are very blue this close together.

“We keep running into each other,” Steve says.

Bucky nods and smiles. “I noticed,” he says. “It’s not purposeful. I promise. I wouldn’t try to mess with you like that after our conversation the other night.”

It’s the truth. He’d come here to forget about Steve, not run into him. If he had known Steve would be at this nightclub, he’d’ve been in Queens.

“Maybe it’s…” He runs his tongue over his bottom lip. “Do you believe in fate?” Steve asks.

Here with Steve in the dark club, bright lights pulsing ahead like dying stars, it would be easy to say yes. It would be romantic, wouldn’t it? To believe that there was something guiding the two of them together again and again and to just give into whatever this is.

But Bucky knows better than anyone that the world is as random as it is cruel.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t.”

“I do,” Steve says.

“Okay.”

He steps in closer to Bucky. “I believed it since I first saw you, Bucky. I thought you were an angel,” he says, voice cracking. His breath smells like alcohol, which would explain most of this behavior. “I thought you were there to tell me that my mom had died,” he says. “Instead you sat with me and helped me through the worst time in my life until you disappeared. Then you paid my tuition and kept me in school, I…” He blinks hard. “Who _are_ you?” he asks. “If you’re not my guardian angel, then who are you?”

Bucky sighs. “Maybe I’m the devil,” he says with a half-smile.

“I find that very hard to believe,” Steve says inching closer. He puts a hand on Bucky’s hip. “I want to kiss you,” he says in a quiet voice, barely audible over the thumping music in the background.

Bucky shakes his head, just the slightest movement. “Steve,” he says. “I’m no good.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Steve asks, sounding frustrated, almost angry with Bucky. His grip on Bucky’s hip tightens slightly. “You don’t say it’s not what you want, but what I shouldn’t want.”

“You caught me there,” Bucky says.

“Then tell me why. Don’t I deserve that?”

“That’s manipulative,” Bucky says with a slight chuckle.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Steve says, voice cracking. “Please don’t laugh at me.”

Bucky’s face falls. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

Steve shakes his head, lets it fall forward just a little. “No, no. I’m being too emotional. I get too emotional.”

“When you drink?” Bucky asks.

Steve nods. “Sam took me out to cheer me up, but I’m a morose drunk. Then I saw you walk in and I…” He exhales. “I want to believe in fate. I don’t want to think of what it means if it’s not real.”

“Just means that there are coincidences, good or bad,” Bucky says. “But just because I don’t believe in something doesn’t mean you can’t. You can believe in whatever you want. I think that’s called the separation of church and state.”

“Then I’ll keep believing,” Steve says, drawing ever closer, so close that they’re practically breathing the same air. Or, they would be if Bucky actually needed to breathe. “Bucky, I want to keep seeing you. I don’t want you to disappear. I want…” He pauses, squeezes Bucky’s side. “I don’t care who you are or what you are. I just want you.”

Bucky feels his face fall, his blood turning to ice in his veins. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what you are’?” he asks, taking a step away.

“No, no, no,” Steve says, following Bucky and reaching for his shoulder with his free hand. “Ignore me, don’t listen to me, Bucky I—”“No,” Bucky interrupts. “I need to go,” Bucky says, pulling him from Steve’s grasp and running out of the club, ignoring Steve’s cries behind him.

— —

It takes Bucky an hour to find some sap he can lure into an alley. He’s messy, but the guy’s alive.

As he tells a woman to call nine-one-one he knows he’s acting stupid, impulsive. But it won’t matter anyway. If Steve knows what he is, there’s only so much time he has left here before he has to go.

It doesn’t matter if he leaves a trail of blood behind him.

— —

Except when he returns to his apartment, Steve is sitting outside the door.

“I sobered up,” he says by way of a greeting.

Bucky doesn’t say anything, just goes to his door and unlocks it with shaking fingers.

“Bucky, I’m sorry,” Steve says. “I didn’t mean to… Not like that.” He starts standing up as Bucky opens the door. “Can we just talk? I really do have some things to ask you.”

“I have nothing to tell you,” Bucky says, slipping inside, but Steve — the sneaky bastard — sticks his foot in the way. “This is breaking and entering,” Bucky says.

“Just entering, I think,” Steve says with a smile. “C’mon Bucky, please.”

God, Bucky is weak. Natasha would be so disappointed in him.

“Fine,” Bucky says. But I don’t answer anything I don’t want to.”

Steve eagerly slips into the apartment. He looks a little worse for wear, skin sweaty and hair mussed. From the smell of him, Bucky wouldn’t be surprised if whatever Steve had been drinking made its way back up before he came to the apartment.

“Do you want a glass of water?” Bucky asks, because he’s not a huge dick.

“Sure,” Steve says, wringing his hands in front of him like he didn’t think this all through.

Bucky goes to the kitchen and fills a glass with water from his Brita pitcher before bringing it back to Steve. He can feel Steve’s eyes on him the whole time and it makes him itchy under the collar. If he’d known that Steve was waiting for him here, he wouldn’t have come back. He would’ve transformed into a bat and stayed in that alleyway until dawn like the animal that he is.

“Thanks,” Steve says, taking the glass from Bucky. He takes the smallest of sips, then sets it down on a table.

“What, no coaster?” Bucky asks. Steve’s eyes go wide and Bucky chuckles. “I’m joking, Jesus.”

“Thanks for letting me inside,” he says. His eyes stray to his painting on the wall. “You really hung it up,” he says, lips curling into a grin. “I was half-convinced you’d throw it away.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Bucky says, flopping onto the couch with a sigh. “You have about fifteen minutes before I need to go to sleep,” Bucky says. In all actuality, the sun doesn’t rise for another forty, but Bucky likes to have some prep time before the dawn. “So whatever it is you want to say, now would be the time to say it.”

“So you can’t be in the sun?” Steve asks. Bucky frowns and doesn’t answer. “Okay,” Steve says. “I can remember that.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Bucky says with a sigh. He feels his age, for once. The weight of the world on his shoulders. “Money? I can get you money.”

“What?” Steve says, closing the space between them with a determined gait. “You think I want _money_?” he asks, seeming more than a little offended.

“You wouldn’t be the first person who has tried to blackmail me,” Bucky says with a shrug. “Emphasis on try.”

“I don’t want your money,” Steve says, he frowns, brow furrowing. “I can’t take anything else from you.”

“You haven’t taken anything from me,” Bucky says.

“Yes I have, you know I have,” Steve says, then seems to lose a little of his anger, deflating just a bit. “You saved my life,” he says, voice cracking.

“You would’ve had a life with or without Pratt,” Bucky says.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Steve snaps. He pauses, takes a breath. A single bead of sweat slips down his temple. “The night after my ma died I was hit by a car. You did something and saved me.”

“It was probably just a dream,” Bucky says in a quiet voice, turning his eyes up to Steve’s. “It was—”

“Don’t,” Steve says, turning his own eyes down. “Don’t try to make me forget again, Bucky. I don’t want to forget you, any part of you.”

Bucky sighs. “Fine,” he says. “You’re being very theatrical about all of this,” he adds because Steve is. He’s being incredibly dramatic about all of this. If either of them should be theatrical, it should be the mythical being, but Bucky only feels exhausted.

“I started remembering after our dinner,” Steve says. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“That’s not unusual,” Bucky says. “Proximity can make it wear off.” He doesn’t add that affection will, as well.

“What is it?”

“A suggestion, mostly.”

“Do you do it often?”

Bucky nods. “It’s necessary.”

“For what?”

“Do you know?” Bucky asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I have my guesses.”

“Well?” Bucky asks, because he may as well get this over with.

“Well, you’re a vampire,” Steve says with a shrug. “Right?”

“I vant to suck yer blood,” Bucky says with his best Bela Lugosi impression.

There’s quiet between them for a long moment.

Then Steve starts cracking up. There’s a manic edge to it actually, as Steve clutches his stomach and doubles over. “God,” he says when he can get control of himself again. “Wow, that’s…” There are tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. “So you’re really a vampire?” he asks, breathless from the laughter.

“If I told you no would it make a difference?” Bucky asks.

Steve shakes his head.

Bucky sighs. Why does Steve need to make everything so difficult?

“Well, what do you want from me?” Bucky asks, the truth being out not enough to keep him from feeling so tired. He’s old enough and experienced enough that he should have known not to get emotionally attached to a human in any way, shape, or form. Humans are messy and emotional, driven by base instincts, easily broken, and most likely disappointing.

God, he had hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed by Steve.

Steve frowns. “What do you mean?” Steve asks. “I thought I made that clear.”

“You also made it clear that you now have leverage against me, so I’m just asking what you want from me now that you know.”

“What would I want?” Steve asks and Bucky could laugh.

“Eternal life? Money? Power? I don’t have much to give besides those, and I’m a little iffy on how I could possibly give you power besides killing your enemies. Do artists even have enemies?”

“Critics,” Steve says, a weird look on his face.

Bucky shrugs. “Sure,” he says.

“I don’t want you to kill anyone,” Steve says.

It’s a little late for that, but it’s a nice thought. Leave it to Steve to be having it.

“Then what is it?” Bucky asks. “There must be a reason that you came here to shove my nose into your detective work.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Steve starts, then trails off. “I don’t want any of that,” Steve says.

“Then…?” Bucky asks, getting increasingly irritated. The sun will be rising soon. He needs to get to bed.

“I told you what I want a hundred times!” Steve snaps, moving his hands to his hair and pulling a little. When he moves his arms back down again, he looks a little crazed. “I want to be your _friend_ , okay? That’s it. I don’t want money or power or a pile of bodies at my door. I don’t _care_ that you’re a vampire. You’re kind and you’re funny and you’re real, and I just want to know you. So I came to say that if you were pushing me away because I’m a human you don’t have to.”

Bucky swallows hard.

“If there’s another reason, well. I don’t like it, but I’ll leave you alone. But if you just wanted to keep me away because we’re different, then you don’t have to.”

Honestly, Bucky isn’t sure what to say. All of this feels like it’s come out of an overwrought off-Broadway play, something where everyone spends a lot of time screaming and drinking out of rocks glasses. This isn’t how Bucky’s life typically goes. Usually, he comes home at night to an empty apartment with nothing to do but watch TV until he pulls his blackout curtains and goes to sleep. There’s so very much going on at the moment and it’s a little difficult to figure out what his next step should be.

“Okay,” Bucky says.

Steve takes one deep breath, then another. He looks at Bucky like he’s waiting for more of an answer, but Bucky isn’t sure that he has any more of an answer to give. “Okay?” he asks, finally.

“Okay,” Bucky says again. “I think I got it.”

“Got what?”

“Why you’re here,” Bucky says.

There’s a long moment of quiet between them.

“Okay,” Steve says, finally. He pauses. “The sun should be up pretty soon,” he says.

“I’m aware.”

“Do you need to go to a coffin?” Steve asks. Bucky snorts. “Is that funny?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest like he’s offended, and frowning. God, he’s a cute guy.

“I need to go to bed,” Bucky says. “I sleep in a bed. I boarded up the window and have blackout curtains just to make sure.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “Did you uh…” He trails off, frowns.

“Did I what?” Bucky asks.

“Eat?” Steve asks in a quiet voice.

Bucky thinks back to his meal, to the way that he had to check that the man was breathing. His throat goes dry.

“I did,” he says.

“Do you have to kill?” Steve asks. “To eat?”

Bucky shakes his head. “No,” he says in a quiet voice, one he hopes will keep Steve from looking that nervous again. “I haven’t killed anyone in a long time.”

There’s a moment of quiet. Then Steve says, “But you’ve killed someone?”

“I told you I was a murderer when we met,” Bucky reminds him gently. “But I haven’t killed since 1895, if that’s any relief.”

“It is,” Steve says.

“I do need to go to sleep,” Bucky says. He can feel the sun starting to rise like a prickle on his skin; he knows it’s time.

“Can I see you again tomorrow?” Steve asks.

Bucky should hesitate. He should hypnotize Steve again. He should pack his things and move out, never to come back to this city again.

He doesn’t do those things. He hasn’t done those things. He knows he won’t do those things.

“Yes,” he says instead. “Yes, you can.”

— —

_Six Months Later_

— —

Bucky glides gently onto Steve’s balcony and lands on the balls of his feet. Steve is already laying on a lawn chair, a drink in one hand and a battered copy of _The Goldfinch_ in the other. “Hi,” he says, sitting up and grinning.

“Hey,” Bucky says, putting his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “You ready for company?”

“’Course I am,” Steve says, setting down the book. “It’s been a while,” he says, then bites down on his bottom lip.

“It’s only been three weeks,” Bucky says, sitting down on the edge of Steve’s chair near his bare feet. It’s summer now, and the days are getting longer. Usually Bucky would take a trip down south during this time of year, but lately, he hasn’t done any traveling that isn’t absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, however, the three-week trip to Europe was absolutely necessary — there were a few auctions he had to attend and sales he had to oversee to make sure that the next few months run smoothly, financially speaking.

“It’s been too long,” Steve says with a shrug.

“I had very important vampire business to attend to,” Bucky says, trying to sound very impressive.

Steve snorts. “Yeah? You meet up with the Cullens to take on the Illuminati?”

“Yes,” Bucky says.

There’s a beat, then Steve reaches over and pokes Bucky’s side. Bucky frowns and swats away his hand. “You deserved that,” he says.

“I deserved nothing. Besides, don’t you have any common sense? You shouldn’t provoke a creature designed to destroy you.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “If you wanted to destroy me you would’ve done it by now.”

“Maybe I’m just saving you up for a special occasion. You ever think of that?”

“Or maybe you’re a coward who’s just afraid to kill me.”

Bucky sighs. “Maybe I am,” he says with a shrug and a smile.

Steve smiles back.

In the past six months, Bucky has spent a lot of evenings with Steve, doing just this: sitting, talking, hanging out. Half-worried at the start that Steve wouldn’t actually like him for anything more than the memories of those nights where he sat with him outside of Mount Sinai Hospital, Steve and Bucky have somehow become… good friends.

Very near best friends, Bucky would say if hard pressed to do so.

“Sam wants to come over,” Steve says. “He wants to kick your ass again at Mario Kart.”

“It’s not fair to make me play against you two. You’re seasoned pros. You’ve been playing since _childhood_.”

“You have a literally infinite amount of time to practice and Nintendo is only a few years younger than you are, so I really don’t want to hear you complain.”

“Only a few years younger?” Bucky asks. “Have you forgotten that I was born during the Civil War?”

“Nintendo was founded in the 1880s. Look it up.”

Bucky pulls out his phone and does just that.

1889\. Shit.

“I don’t want to say that I told you so, but,” Steve says, grinning.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right, I’m wrong, the universe is in balance.”

“So, should I text Sam?” Steve asks.

Bucky sighs, then nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Text Sam.”

— —

Walking down the street with Steve by his side shouldn’t feel right. It shouldn’t start to feel familiar. But Steve creeps further into his life with every passing week. One day he’s talking to Natasha over drinks at a hip Brooklyn bar, the next, he’s coming with Bucky to an auction in Manhattan. Steve shifts his gallery schedule so that he can fit Bucky’s schedule better; though, he can’t always stay up as late as Bucky can and will sometimes crash on Bucky’s couch while Bucky catches up on paperwork or looks at an auction catalog or two.

It’s been a long time since he’s had someone in his apartment who actually needs to breathe to live. Sometimes he can’t help himself; he’ll be sitting in his living room chair, _The Office_ playing quietly on the TV, the light shining on Steve as he sleeps, one of Bucky’s too-short throws over the middle of his body. And sometimes Bucky will just _look_ , see the way Steve’s chest moves, the breath going in and out of him.

He gets the Edward Cullen thing now. When you only breathe for show, it’s kind of a marvel to watch someone breathe for real.

It’s kind of strange how love creeps into the picture. It makes Bucky feel like he’s breathing for the first time since the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Tonight, Steve wakes up and looks back at Bucky. He’d been out at the doctor’s office today, he knows. Whatever was happening kind of took it out of him. “What’re you doing?” he mumbles in a sleepy voice, rubbing at his eyes.

“Looking at you,” Bucky says plainly.

“I know I’m handsome,” Steve says with a cocky grin.

“Yeah, you are,” Bucky replies, too honest, as he looks back down at his iPad.

It’s a mistake. When he looks up at Steve again, he’s still looking at Bucky, but with something like wonder in his eyes.

It’s a mistake.

It can’t happen.

“I love you,” Steve says.

— —

A thousand visions run through Bucky’s mind all at once.

He sees Steve as he was ten years ago, laying in a puddle of his own blood. Bucky walks away. The thermos of almond milk hot chocolate stays in the street. He sees Steve crying in an alleyway, watching Bucky as he keeps himself alive on another man’s blood. The sound of his footsteps echo against the stone as he runs away.

He sees Steve as he is today, standing under a magnolia tree in a tuxedo, grinning, a ring box in his hand. The sun is shining bright and the man walking towards him is not Bucky.

There is no future for Steve with Bucky.

— —

“Don’t go,” Steve says, grabbing Bucky’s hand, holding on as hard as he can. “Bucky, don’t go.”

“You can have everything,” Bucky says. “Take the apartment. Take everything—”

“I only want you,” Steve says, tears in his eyes. “Forget I said it, okay?”

“How can I forget?” Bucky asks, to his own dawning horror. “I’ll never be able to forget that.”

Steve wraps his arms around Bucky and presses his face into the crook of Bucky’s neck. “I love you so much,” he says like he can’t help himself. “I don’t know what to do with it or without you.”

“You’ll be fine without me,” Bucky says. He feels rigid, like rigor mortis is setting in. He can smell Steve’s blood pulsing through his veins, he can hear Steve’s heart beat. Steve is so alive. He deserves to be alive.

“Don’t go,” Steve says, miserable. He’s crying; Bucky can feel his tears drip onto his skin.

— —

He’d never been to the city before. Bucky Barnes was a farmer’s son from Shelbyville, Indiana. He’d saved for months and months to take his two sisters to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

His first night in town he left his sisters at his aunt’s place on the Gold Coast and made his way towards the University of Chicago, where a friend was studying.

He never made it there.

Three nights later he walked around the famed White City, dazed and starving.

He killed four people that night.

Bucky killed and killed and killed until he met Natasha two years later and she told him that there were other ways to go about this whole undead thing. They moved to Brooklyn, which has been his home, on and off, since then. And he hasn’t killed since.

— —

“I don’t deserve your love,” Bucky says, his own eyes filling with bloody tears. His vision goes red. “I don’t deserve _you_ ,” he adds, his own despair apparent in each word.

“You do. We deserve each other. It’s fate,” Steve says, still not letting go.

Bucky’s tears drip blood onto Steve’s white shirt.

“I have to go now,” Bucky says. “I can’t stay here. I can’t _ruin_ you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I want to suck you dry,” Bucky says.

Steve’s body tenses for a moment, then relaxes back into Bucky’s. “I’ll let you.”

That’s the problem. That’s the fucking problem.

“Take everything.”

“The painting’s yours.”

“Forget about me, please.”

“I’ll never.”

Bucky’s mind buzzes, it’s all static.

“I love you,” Steve repeats. “You’re my angel.”

Bucky transforms into a bat and flies away.

— —

_One Year Later_

— —

“Is it worth living anymore?” Bucky asks Natasha one night in Bogotá. She’s just visiting. He needed her to come.

“Of course it is,” she says. “There’s no other option, really.”

“Real death, I suppose.”

Natasha pours herself another glass of vodka, takes a sip. “You should go back to New York,” she says.

“I can’t.”

“You should.” She pauses, looks into the middle distance. “If there’s something that makes this existence worth living, you need to chase it. If you only have a limited amount of time with Steve, you should savor every moment. Run back to him as quickly as you can. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise what?” Bucky asks, fearing the answer.

“Otherwise, you’re probably right. There’s not much of a point.”

— —

He contemplates stepping into the sunlight one morning. That night, he returns to New York.

— —

Bucky glides gently onto Steve’s balcony and lands on the balls of his feet.

But Steve moved away.

— —

He feels despondent, but knows that he needs to eat, even if he’s sick of the hunt.

He finds himself wandering around Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn. His connection is still there, willing to sneak him out a bag of blood every so often. He still doesn’t do it too often — he knows all too well that the blood can be life or death for a human who may need it — but it’s been a long day, there’s gentle, steady snow falling around him, and he’s looking for an easy fix since he’s had an emotionally draining day and he just wants to get out of the cold.

He’s waiting beneath the streetlight that he always waits beneath when he notices the guy sitting on a bench across the street alone.

The streetlight above him is still flickering, all these years later, and between the snow and shadow, the scene is a near-replica of the painting Bucky left behind in his New York apartment a year ago.

Bucky’s throat goes dry, but he still walks across the street. Maybe it’s the way that a small pile of snow has begun to collect on the top of the man’s yellow hair and in the creases of his jacket. Or the way that his tired blue eyes reflect in the light when he sees Bucky walking his way.

“Hey Steve,” Bucky says, wincing internally. He’s been alive for a long time, but he’s kind of a joke when it comes to interacting with people, especially people who he loves. “You lost or something?”

Steve looks up. The tip of his nose is red and there are heavy bags beneath his eyes. But he smiles. “No,” he says.

“Are you… okay?” Bucky asks. He’s not quite sure how to talk to someone he loves; it’s been a long time since he’s tried. But it’s Steve and Steve is looking at him like he’s the best thing he’s seen in a long time, so maybe he’s doing okay.

“I’m just getting out of chemo,” he says. The world spins around Bucky. He flops down onto the bench next to Steve. Immediately, Steve inches closer to him. “I missed you,” he says.

“How’s it… what’s it…”

“I’m supposed to die within a year,” Steve says. “Same thing my ma had, runs in my family. It’s all very tragic.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. “I thought we’d have more time,” he admits, but knows it’s a stupid thing to say, given the situation.

Steve shrugs. “I’ll take whatever time I can get with you. I knew you’d come back.”

“Why’s that?” Bucky asks.

“Because you love me.”

Bucky shuts his eyes and presses a lingering kiss to Steve’s temple. “I love you,” he says, feeling snow fall on his hair, his cheek. “I’m sorry it took me this long.”

“We still have some time,” Steve says as Bucky pulls away. He gives Bucky this brave little smile and reaches for his hand before giving it a squeeze. God, the fact that Steve is the one comforting Bucky right now is fucked up in its own right, but God, does Bucky need the comfort.

Bucky exhales. “We could have more time,” he says.

“Buck?”

“We could have forever,” Bucky says.

“I wouldn’t ask.”

“But I’d offer.”

They stare at each other for a long moment and it makes sense, it really does. Bucky doesn’t see a point to eternity if Steve isn’t in it with him. He could go on, sure, and he would. But he needs to ask. He needs to _try_. If not, he’ll spend every moment he can with Steve until his natural end.

But he’d rather he not reach his natural end.

“You would do that?”

“I told you I was a murderer the day I met you,” Bucky says with a wry smile.

“An angel of death,” Steve corrects in a quiet voice. “You realize that it would mean that you’re stuck with me forever, right? No way out after this? You couldn’t just…” His voice cracks. “You couldn’t run away again.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Bucky says. He leans in and kisses Steve on the lips for the first time. They’re chapped and warm. They’re the best thing Bucky’s tasted in a hundred years. “I won’t run away again,” he whispers. Steve’s breath is hot.

“Okay,” Steve says. “I’m ready.”

Bucky doesn’t need to be told twice. He bites down hard on his own wrist and draws dark blood, holds it up to Steve’s mouth. Steve looks down at Bucky’s arm with trepidation for just a moment, then latches on, drinking. “Gross,” he mutters, lips bloody, as Bucky moves his wrist away.

Grinning, Bucky moves his teeth to Steve’s neck and bites.

Steve takes his last breath and dies in Bucky’s arms.

— —

He opens his eyes again a moment later.

Steve is resplendent, practically glowing. “Hi,” he says, eyes shining bright in the winter night.

“Welcome to hell,” Bucky says, taking Steve’s hand in his.

Steve grins. “Seems more like heaven to me,” he says, leaning in to give Bucky a kiss.

— —

_Fin_

**Author's Note:**

> And there's that! Thank you so much for reading. Please know that I live for comments, they keep my cold heart pumping blood.
> 
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